“I’m
in the young lawyer advocacy project. We are with 10, working in
different regions of Cameroon. I’m a jurist and have a degree in
international relations. I do research on forest biodiversity in Africa.
The Congo Basin is the second largest ecological reserve in the world,
after the Amazon. Activities such as forest exploitation, mining, and
agro-industrial exploitation cause problems concerning the biodiversity.
The economic policies we put in place in the Congo Basin do not
integrate the issue of biodiversity. Because of this lack of interest
there’s a lot of deforestation going on. In the city we don’t feel the
impact of climate change but when we go to the villages, we see that the
women have to walk more kilometers to get water and they do a lot of
farming only to have a small harvest. Climate change is real, it is not a
myth. But we cannot say it’s a problem of the villagers only, and that
it is not our problem.”

“Pollution
is one of the major problems here in Cameroon. The air is polluted and
some of the communities do not have clean drinking water anymore. Young
people are interested in finding solutions to the pollution problems but
there is not a lot of funding. You can support us with ideas. If you in
your country have a good example, you can help us with implementing it
here.”

“One
of our aims as Young FoE Africa is building the next generation of
activists and leaders for climate and environmental justice. There’s
still a long way to go. We really feel we are not part of climate action
development. We just receive solutions on climate change and are not
fully involved. I think we should come together, we from Africa and you
from Europe, working on climate justice issues, make our voice being
heard, and make sure to have an impact on the policy level. But also in
the field, because the people who are mainly affected by climate change
live in the field and those people do not always have spaces to express
their frustrations on these issues.”